The information in this website is therefore out of date but retained for archival and staff purposes.

Investigating the idea of progress in history and the historical sciences

The ‘Science, Progress and History’ project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and the University of Queensland seeks to explore questions at the interface of history and the natural sciences, with a focus on laws, patterns and narrative structures in human history, evolutionary history, and cosmology.

The project is concerned with questions of progress and order in the historical sciences (history, geology, evolutionary biology, cosmology). It will deal with the manner in which ideas of historical progress came to inform the emerging natural sciences from the seventeenth onwards and, conversely, on how notions of order and progress in the natural sciences have subsequently been applied to human affairs.